News...

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OPaC undergoing heavy changes.

The latest available version of the OPaC class library is
OPaC 1.0.3. It is quite old now and does not include Linux/X11 support, since
important low level modifications have been undertaken. The sources are available for download. OPaC is undergoing heavy changes. The next
public version will most probably be available by the end of the year.

The most important changes since the first release are
the support for alpha transparency and translucency, the
use of the FreeType library for font rendering and a
smart revisionless serialisation algorithm.

OPaC support for transparency
and 8-bit alpha translucency is 100% system independent. It is based on a
set of custom 32-bit graphic routines used internally to draw into pixmaps. These pixmaps
are then displayed on the host's display. [enlarged
view of window].

OPaC bright ideas was founded by Pierre Arnaud in 1995 in order to promote the
development of the OPaC Class Library, an application
framework freely redistributable under the terms of the OPaC
Free Public License (based on the original Aladdin GhostScript Free Public License).

OPaC class library

The OPaC class library is a collection of C++ classes
available for Windows 95, Windows NT and Linux/X11.
OPaC provides numerous portable widgets which can be edited dynamically while the
application is running. This is possible thanks to a revolutionary dynamic user interface
editor.

Download

You can download the sources and the binary
distribution of OPaC here.

Documentation

There are only a few papers available, among them a tutorial explaining how to build a user interface and a
preliminary programming guide.
Laurent Bovet's Linux porting guide provides some insight (PostScript or PDF).
An article I published in DDJ, August 1996, gives some
insight on dynamic message passing, one of the cornerstones used to build OPaC.

Resources on the web

A developer's mailing list has been set up for
interested people. You can find details about it here.

Availability

OPaC is essentially free for non commercial usage. The
sources are available under the OPaC free public license in
order to encourage further development and porting to other operating systems.

History

Work on OPaC has been in progress since 1991. The first
drafts were written in assembler for the Smaky.
In 1991, I switched to C++ and started to write the first real version of OPaC, which
should have provided a new OS to the Smaky.
As systems like NeXTSTEP or Apple's MacApp became popular, I redesigned OPaC
in order to support their most interesting concepts.

Current status

The Win32 version is quite stable now.
Support for the Linux/X11 platform is currently broken. It will be fixed with version
1.0.4, to be available in August.FreeType is used to display characters in a uniform
and portable way.

Contributions

If you are interested in the project or want to
help porting OPaC to another OS (OS/2, MacOS, Be, etc.), just send me some e-mail. Contributors are welcome !

Please visit the OPaC tutorial. You will learn a lot about OPaC in a few
minutes... It explains how to dynamically build a user interface for a simple
demonstration program, which multiplies two real numbers and graphically displays the
result.